Sunday, January 22, 2006

We all know that the "Culture of Life" the NeoCons are pushing is just another Big Lie from Karl Rove's bag of tricks. It sounds so noble - how could a reasonable, caring person object? The reality of it is quite different. They had no problem killing 100,000+ Iraqi civilians who never harmed a US citizen that wasn't trying to kill them. They had no problem sending our troops into an illegal war with no justification. They have no problem executing prisoners, even if they are retarded, or old and blind. Add to this all of the people who will die from AIDS, the women who will die needlessly in childbirth or from back alley abortions, or cervical cancer because the FDA is suppressing a vaccine that prevents the spread of HPV, and you have what can only be considered a Culture of Death.

The real goal of the NeoConservative, anti-choice movement is to stop all sex by anyone except married, heterosexual couples. Their precious patriarchy is in danger and they don't care who has to die to preserve it. The only way to maintain a rule by rich white men is to suppress women's sexuality. Rather than have people experience healthy, safe sex, they want a populace that is a repressed as possible so the ruling class can channel the people's energy into hate and war.

The greatest fear of patriarchy is sexuality - or what they would call "hedonism." A person with a healthy sex life is less likely to kill for an army, die for a cause, oppress another person for an arbitrary reason like gender, race, religion or sexual orientation. "Live and Let Live" won't keep those defense contracts rolling in. Sensuality makes a person hard to exploit. Only by insisting that society be arranged in nuclear units with a dominant male at the head of the home can they be sure to control women's lives, work, and bodies.

The wealth of the world is built on the work of women. The power structure wants to keep women in the home, focused on providing unpaid labor in keeping the home and raising the children. Paying someone, especially a woman, to do domestic chores subverts the hierarchy by putting money in the hands of women who might otherwise be forced to provide those services for free - or for a roof over her head, provided of course by the "breadwinner" husband.

Women with choices are harder to please. They won't tolerate an abusive spouse. They insist on fair pay. They want a say in when and how they have sex. They expect to be included in the decisions that affect their lives. They demand sovereignty over their own bodies. Choices of all kinds make women harder to control.

In a system that systematically oppresses women, control is everything. In patriarchy, the husband is favored in society and in law. Equality demands more of men. They have to accept responsibility for their offspring. They have to compete with women, who are rapidly proving to be better at almost everything. With any luck, there will soon be penalties for men who habitually prey on women and abandon them with their children. A guy has to work a lot harder in a fair system to create the same benefit he could demand under patriarchy, and his relative position is no longer dominant.

NO group is going to voluntarily give up an inherent advantage - especially if that group has been trained to have a sense of entitlement that tells them they deserve more because they are more. We see the effects of white male entitlement all around us. Most serial killers are white men. Most school shootings are by white boys. Rape, robbery and domestic violence are almost exclusively male crimes. In thge United States, murder with firearms is more common than in any other industrialized nation, and most of the killers are men. The most common cause of death for pregnant women, as well as for women in the work place, is murder.

Most of Western Culture still suffers from remnants of patriarchy, but nowhere in the West is it fighting for dear life the way it is here in the States. There's a direct correlation between the sense of entitlement a man feels that tells him he has the right to rape or murder and the sense that he has the right to dominate a wife and a child. It's no accident that the NRA is intimately entwined with the Republican party. It's no accident that the NeoCons hate gun control. It's so much easier to control your family if they know you have a gun and are willing to use it.

Europe is aghast at what the United States has become. We used to lead the world in progressive thought, innovation, education, social progress, and culture. The last 25 years or so has seen the United States take a dramatic step backward. We no longer have an advantage in education, and China and Japan have overtaken the advantage we once had in business.

We are the only developed country where the infant mortality rate is going up; where racism is a blatant, unyielding problem; where violence approaches levels more akin to African genocides than Western crime rates; where feminism is becoming more reviled rather than more common and assimilated into public policy; Where the welfare of our citizens takes a back seat to profit; where children go unsheltered and untended by the millions.

This latest wave of patriarchal hatred has made us venal and uncaring. Our generous spirit has been replaced by greed and lust for power. We've become an oligarchy where only the very wealthy prosper and to hell with everyone else.

And, yes, believe it or not, this all comes back to sex. Power for the people is being replaced by power over the people. The Rape Culture not only oppresses women, it represses all but a small fraction of the population. A person who respects others cannot rape, rip off old ladies or turn a blind eye to children's suffering. A person in touch with their own sensuality empathizes in a way that no ruler, no patriarch, no corporation, no government ever could.

All violence stems from somatosensory deprivation. Sex is a normal, healthy activity for adults. The United States own prudishness is proof of the sexual repression here. The biggest scandal of my lifetime should be what the Administration is doing right now - instead, as far as the media is concerned it was the Clinton scandal. Europe couldn't believe it was an issue; Russians were jealous that they didn't have such a young, virile leader.

Look at the Janet Jackson dust up. That wouldn't have cause a ripple anywhere but the United States and the most repressive areas of the Middle East. Now there's an effort to censor books, movies and television in ways not seen for a quarter century. Suddenly, the government wants to intercept our internet searches and snoop through our reading lists. The irony is that the group that screams about opposing the Taliban is the group most like them. We've set the women in Iraq back 100 years; women in America are looking at the same fate.

Abortion is finally being recognized as a basic Human Right, but this fight is not about whether women can have an abortion. It's about whether we own our own bodies. It's about whether we can have sex when we want, with whomever we choose. It's about whether we let 5,000 year old tribal mores - the same mores causing so much misery in Africa, Serbia, and the Middle East - are going to limit our behavior in the 21st Century. The Republican's own unethical, hypocritical behavior proves that they care nothing for morality. All they care about is control. Control of government; control of wealth; control of women's bodies.

A disturbing new ritual has surfaced among the trash in the US Armed services called the “Death Jerk”. The “Death Jerk” is similar to the “circle jerk” in that the solders stand in a circle and masturbate and the winner is the one who orgasms first. The difference between the “Death Jerk” and the “circle jerk” is stories of murder and torture are recounted to the group while they stimulate themselves to intensify the orgasm. This strange and vulgar ritual is evidence of the US Armed Services “Torture Fetish” in action.